


archive

by valety



Category: Odin Sphere
Genre: F/M, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Soft Apocalypse, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 14:52:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13953951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valety/pseuds/valety
Summary: Gwendolyn returns from exploring. A quiet evening follows.





	archive

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for references to suicidal ideation, and also, like. everybody in the world being dead
> 
> “where did the text archive even come from if the whole entire world was destroyed, that’s so illogical” <\- a question nobody has ever asked but which I have now endeavoured to answer
> 
> I took some liberties with how much of the original erion would probably have actually survived, but that’s just because it doesn’t seem exactly fair that gwendolyn and oswald would have to start entirely from scratch. so, let’s pretend that they could salvage enough to at least live comfortably \o/

The green which surrounds you now is different than the sort of green you’d known in Elrit. This is a green which gently tugs at the bow-backed skeleton structures of the few buildings left standing and brings them toppling down to earth, clearing the horizon and masking all traces of human civilization beneath thick vines and a plush-like carpet of grass. It’s a primal sort of green. It feels strange to be marking it as you cut through the fields, following the setting sun as you make your way back home.

It helps to _have_ a home. Your shelter is crude enough that you hesitate to call it a _house,_ but it has four walls and a roof, and it’s where you sleep at night with Oswald, and that’s enough to satisfy you. It doesn’t matter how it looks, anyway. To have a home is to feel as though you have a part in all of this. A small part, to be sure, but a part nonetheless, the way the birds nesting in the trees or the wildflowers trembling in the wind all have their parts, even if they’re ones you cannot understand just yet.

So long as your clumsily-made shelter remains standing, you can feel as though your survival wasn’t just a freak accident. You can almost convince yourself that it’s the way things were _suppose_ d to be. And that means that you, too, are meant to be here, no matter how loud you may feel in comparison to the all-encompassing quiet of the new world.     

You’ve timed your return well, you think. The sun may have begun to slip away in earnest, but you can see your almost-house now, standing as it always has at the base of the enormous ash tree that perpetually looms on the horizon. You’re close enough that you can risk it, you decide, even on your clumsily-repaired wings that are still nowhere near as good as they _ought_ to be, and so you begin to run, ignoring how your satchels clatter noisily against your armour when you do.

Your wings spread, and, springing off a small rise on the ground, you leap into the air, where you catch the evening breeze and begin to fly. 

You had been away, exploring; a reconnaissance mission of sorts. Your objective had been to search what had once been Titania, it being one of the human kingdoms easiest to reach from where you’d wound up settling. You and Oswald usually undertook such trips together, but you had gone alone this time. The excuse you’d given was that you’d wanted to test your mended wings, but the truth was, you had simply not wanted him near Titania. You suspect he knew and had let you have the lie, but either way, you’re not about to feel guilty, not after the stories he had told you of corpses roaming the streets and death choking the air. He may be stronger now, but with no path left to the Netherworld, you’re not about to take any chances. Not now, when he’s all you have left.

Had any Halja remained, you would have slain them yourself, psypher or no psypher. Fortunately, the remains of Titania had proven just as quiet as the rest of Erion these days. It had been _so_ quiet, in fact, that you had almost begun to regret your protective streak demanding that you go alone.

It doesn’t matter anymore, though. Not when you’re almost home.  

The sun is but a sliver of gold on the horizon by the time you touch down in the garden, if ‘garden’ is even the right word for the patch of land you and Oswald have been attempting to cultivate. Your landing is a clumsy one—imperfect wings aside, the weight of your overstuffed bags throws you off, and you can’t quite manage to stop completely. Instead you stumble forward several steps, and then you find that you don’t _care_ to stop, because you are close now, so, so close, and you might as well keep running if that means you’ll close the distance sooner.  

Oswald steps outside as you hurtle past a cluster of napple trees. You wonder, _has he been waiting for me,_ but you can’t wonder for very long, because you are still running, and then you are crashing into him, arms open, knocking him backwards. He doesn’t fall, thank goodness; only stumbles backwards a little bit before bracing himself against a wall, and then he wraps his arms around you in return, and you are overcome with an almost giddy sense of relief as something slides back into place that you hadn’t even known had been knocked ajar.

You draw back and pull his face down towards yours. In-between kissing him, you say, “I feel as though I’ve been away for years.”

“It’s only been a few days,” he points out mildly.

“Why are you only sensible about these things when I don’t want to be? It doesn’t matter that it’s only been a few days, I _missed_ you.” But your reproach is too breathless for it to be at all effective, and he smiles faintly instead of looking chastised when you pull him down for another kiss.

The two of you are inside by the time the sun has disappeared completely. As you begin emptying your bags, Oswald lights one of the lanterns you’d found a few months back on the shores of the place where Volkenon had sunk. It doesn’t give off much light, but it adds an air of warmth to your surroundings. It’s a warmth you’re glad for after having been wandering among ghosts for so long.

“I was surprised by how much of Titania was still standing,” you say as Oswald comes to kneel beside you. “Not... a _lot_ , granted, but the rampage of a beast at least leaves rubble to be sifted through, it seems. It was all overgrown, too. It was almost beautiful.”

Oswald nods, but says nothing. His attention is instead fixed on the items you’ve drawn out of your bags. A hammer, a bottle, a scorched leather pouch carrying a handful of old coins—and, perhaps most important of all: paper. Fragments of burned books, scraps of old posters, letters that may or may not have ever reached their final destinations. You’d brought back all you could, and the rest, you’d hidden in the remains of what you think had once been a library or an archive, judging from how much of the paper had been found in that particular pile of rubble.

Not that you could know for sure, of course. But, you reason, if it’s holding books for you, it’s certainly a library _now._  

You must be doing all right, then, if the new Erion already has a library.

The shelves of your almost-house are positively cluttered with Things these days. After you finish emptying your bags, they become even _more_ cluttered. The hammer goes with your other tools—the bladeless sword and spear, the chisel and the trowel. The bottle goes with the empty medicine jars that still need to be washed out in the nearby stream. The coin pouch is tossed onto the shelf where you’ve been storing miscellanea—items that you have no use for, but still can’t bring yourselves to throw away, not when they might very well be the last of their kind.

You’re more careful with the papers. You and Oswald go through those slowly, lingering over each one, stopping occasionally to show them to each other. Here, a diary entry. Here, a poem. Here, a guide to raising chickens. Each one penned by someone you had never known and would never have a chance to know. But it’s okay, you tell yourself. You salvaged them, and now they will be kept safe in the chest you’d built precisely for this purpose. Their memories haven’t been _completely_ lost, not so long as you’re here to preserve them.

There’s something almost soothing about taking the time to pore over papers that might have once struck you as mundane. The only disruption comes when you’re trying to read a page from a Titanian lawbook. You’re as intently focused as though it were a novel you wanted to savour, when suddenly Oswald says, “There’s a flyer here for the Pooka Kitchen and Café.”

“Yes,” you say, looking up. “I thought... I know it’s silly, but I thought that would be worth saving too.”

“It is,” Oswald replies. “It’s just that...”

He seems to fumble for a bit, then apparently gives up on trying to explain, instead handing you the flyer directly. You take it, and the illustrated Pooka smiles up at you.

You stare.

After a moment, you think: those pancakes look unreasonably delicious for a drawing.

Ah.

The silence you share is brief but mournful.

“Of all the things we lost, a nice café is hardly a priority,” you say at last, returning the flyer. You admittedly do so somewhat reluctantly. “We should be grateful we’re alive, not despairing over sweets.”

“It’s been long enough that I think we’re allowed to mourn what we wish,” Oswald answers bluntly. 

“Like pancakes?” you suggest. You’re joking—you think—but a tiny part of you might actually appreciate being allowed to mourn the Pooka Café’s pancakes. And their mulberry tarts. And their strudel. And their cheesecake. And...

“If that is what you miss,” Oswald insists, voice firm. “Erion wasn’t _only_ war and politics. The things that made it worth remembering were always smaller than that. Whatever made you happy is worth letting yourself think about.”

It does something funny to your heart to hear him say that. You are still not used to the idea that the things that made you happy are worth anything at all. But out loud, you only say, “That is why I thought the flyer might be worth saving. It truly _is_ a small thing, but I like the thought of someone someday knowing it existed.”

If it feels strange to think of your happiness mattering, it feels stranger still to be speaking of the future—of a _someone someday_. Even before everything had happened, you hadn’t always been able to manage it. Often, the today had been too overwhelming for you to properly envision a tomorrow. Often, you’d not wanted a tomorrow to come at all. But now you’re thinking _centuries_ into the future, of the land that will survive you, of the descendants who you want to have records of the world that you yourself had come from.

A world that, really, hadn’t been all _that_ bad, in the end. Imperfect, certainly, but there had still been delicious food and stories and people to care about—little motes of light that had brightened the world for you in many ways. There had been enough to make Erion a land worth knowing, and so long as you remember that light, then perhaps the best of Erion will live on.  

But... perhaps you’re getting carried away, you think, watching as Oswald puts the last of the papers in the chest. You don’t need to be getting ahead of yourself by centuries _quite_ yet. The today can be enough for now.

Closing the lid, Oswald abruptly says, “It’s not the same as pancakes from the Pooka Café, but the napples in the garden are ripe, now. We could build a fire and bake some.”

He says this with a look of utter concentration on his face, as though he’d been racking his brain to try and find a way to make pancakes _happen_ somehow before settling on this, and it’s with a helpless sort of fondness welling up in you that you say, “I would like that.”

You take the time to change out of your armour before going to join Oswald outside. A small fire is already burning by the time you do, and the two of you sit down together on the grass, neither of you speaking, shoulders pressed together.

You watch the napples bake, and you think:  _from the beginning, this world has been far kinder to us than we deserve._ The first rains did not fall until you were able to take shelter beneath a canopy of branches, and the only winds that blew back then were warm ones, bringing with them fresh scatterings of phozons. Yet somehow, it’s the moments like these that truly manage to convince you that maybe there’s a chance your survival _wasn’t_ an inexplicable miracle, but instead something meant to be.

It’s quiet, as it has been for a while now. But even so, if you listen closely, you can hear the rustling of the leaves and the crackling of flames. The world is made softer by firelight, and it’s with something like a smile on your face that you watch the rising smoke curl ever upwards, higher and higher, towards the ever-unchanging stars.  


End file.
